Plasmonic Ferroelectric Modulators
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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 37, NO. 2, JANUARY 15, 2019 281 Plasmonic Ferroelectric Modulators Andreas Messner , Felix Eltes ,PingMa ,StefanAbel , Benedikt Baeuerle , Arne Josten , Wolfgang Heni , Daniele Caimi, Jean Fompeyrine , and Juerg Leuthold , Fellow, IEEE, Fellow, OSA (Invited Paper) Abstract—Integrated ferroelectric plasmonic modulators fea- travelling wave electrodes suffer from high electrical losses at turing large bandwidths, broad optical operation range, resilience high frequencies and the walk-off between electrical and opti- to high temperature and ultracompact footprint are introduced. cal signals [6], both of which ultimately limit the modulation Measurements show a modulation bandwidth of 70 GHz and a temperature stability up to 250 °C. Mach–Zehnder interferome- bandwidth and power efficiency of the devices. ter modulators with 10-µm-long phase shifters were operated at The need of higher integration densities led to the emerging of 116 Gbit/s PAM-4 and 72 Gbit/s NRZ. Wide and open eye diagrams the silicon (Si) photonics platform. Si photonics was proposed with extinction ratios beyond 15 dB were found. The fast and robust in 1985 [3]. It relies on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers and devices are apt to an employment in industrial environments. promises to leverage scaling effects similar to the mature CMOS Index Terms—Electrooptic modulators, ferroelectric devices, technology and more compact footprint due to large contrasts high-speed integrated circuits, plasmonics. in refractive indices between adjacent layers. However, Si does I. INTRODUCTION not exhibit the Pockels effect so that Si modulators commonly resort to the plasma dispersion effect. This effect faces a trade- IGH-SPEED, compact and power-efficient electro-optic off between modulation speed and strength and acts on both H (EO) modulators are currently in the spotlight of phase and amplitude of the optical signal. Therefore, a func- research as they are key components in high-capacity optical tional material which exhibits the Pockels effect and which can links. Many physical effects have already been exploited to be cointegrated with the Si photonics platform is of great interest perform electro-optic (EO) modulation. Among them are for for the development of high performance EO modulators. example, the quantum-confined Stark effect [1], [2], the plasma A possible research direction towards this aim is the silicon- dispersion effect [3], [4] or the linear EO effect, commonly organic-hybrid (SOH) platform [7], [8]. There, functional or- called Pockels effect. Here, the Pockels effect is of particular ganic materials offering the Pockels effect are introduced and interest as it provides a large optical bandwidth and a pure modulators have already demonstrated bandwidths of 100 GHz phase modulation such as needed to operate phase shifters [9] and data rates of up to 400 Gbit/s [10]. in MZ and IQ modulators. Both MZ and IQ-modulators are Another technology is the “lithium niobate on insulator” key elements for encoding advanced modulation formats in (LNOI) platform, which is based on a thin film of LNB on high-capacity communication systems. a thick insulating SiO2 layer. Being proposed in 2010 [11], it State-of-the-art EO Pockels modulators commonly rely on has attracted an increasing attention [12]–[14]. Due to the suf- 3 the Pockels effect of lithium niobate (LiNbO ,LNB),aferro- ficient refractive index contrast between LNB (nLNB ≈ 2.2 at electric material. Transmission rates of 1.6 Tbit/s have already λ = ≈ 1550 nm) and SiO2 (nSiO2 1.44), this platform omits been demonstrated using a LNB IQ modulator [5]. Yet, those Si completely and still allows miniaturization of basic passive LNB modulators are typically based on weakly guiding waveg- photonic components, such as ridge waveguides, Y-splitters, uides, resulting in centimeter-long devices [6]. Also, the long multimode interference couplers (MMIs), and resonators [12], [15], [16]. Active components such as EO modulators are di- Manuscript received August 4, 2018; revised October 15, 2018; accepted November 7, 2018. Date of publication November 14, 2018; date of current ver- rectly enabled by the Pockels effect of LNB and benefit from sion February 20, 2019. This work was supported in part by Swiss National the platform’s strong modal confinement and effective overlap Foundation under Project 200021_159565 PADOMO and Project IZCJZ0- between optical and electric signals [12]. Additionally, the low- 158197/1 FF-Photon, in part by the European Commission under Grants FP7- ICT-2013-11-619456-SITOGA, H2020-ICT-2015-25-688579 PHRESCO and permittivity SiO2 layer facilitates velocity matching between H2020-ICT-2017-1-780997 plaCMOS, and in part the Swiss State Secretariat the two signals to further increase the modulation bandwidth. for Education, Research and Innovation under contracts 15.0285 and 16.0001. Recently, Zhang et al. reported a 100 GHz bandwidth Mach- (Corresponding author: Ping Ma.) A. Messner, P. Ma, B. Baeuerle, A. Josten, W. Heni, and J. Leuthold are with Zehnder modulator (MZM) with 5 mm long phase shifters and the Institute of Electromagnetic Fields, ETH Zurich,¨ Zurich¨ 8092, Switzerland a voltage length product of Vπ L = 2.2 Vcm [14]. While the (e-mail:,[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; ajosten@ethz. LNB platform has made significant progress beyond state-of- ch; [email protected]; [email protected]). F. Eltes, S. Abel, D. Caimi, and J. Fompeyrine are with IBM Research– the-art, one of the main limitations of the technology is the small Zurich, Ruschlikon¨ 8803, Switzerland (e-mail:, [email protected]; sab@ substrate size (<6 inch), which is incompatible with current zurich.ibm.com; [email protected]; [email protected]). CMOS standards. In addition, advanced device designs featur- Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. ing smaller footprint, co-integration with Si electronics and even Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JLT.2018.2881332 lower power consumption deserve more research efforts. 0733-8724 © 2018 IEEE. Translations and content mining are permitted for academic research only. Personal use is also permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information. 282 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 37, NO. 2, JANUARY 15, 2019 Fig. 1. False-color SEM images of (a) Plasmonic ferroelectric Mach-Zehnder modulator; (b) a plasmonic phase modulator. (c) Close-up of a tapered mode converter. The Si bus waveguide and tapered mode converter are used to couple the photonic mode into the Au-BTO-Au plasmonic slot waveguide. Insets: Simulated photonic and plasmonic mode profiles, respectively. (d) Simulated electrical field of the photonic mode in the Si waveguide (TE mode). (e) Simulated electrical field of the plasmonic mode (transverse component). (f) Simulated RF field in the slot waveguide (transverse component). We assume r,BTO = 1000. And indeed, there are two opportunities to further reduce [33]. While these demonstrations are very successful, organic the voltage-length product and simultaneously increase the EO materials encounter reservations by the industry as a CMOS bandwidth: The first is to choose a material with a higher Pock- compatible solution of thermally stable materials for low-cost els coefficient than LNB and the second is to switch to a plas- mass-produced transmitter products. monic device geometry which could provide higher modulation In this paper, we report on the current progress in realizing efficiency and smaller RC time constant than typical photonic ultra-compact and high-speed plasmonic ferroelectric modu- devices. lators (PFMs) by effectively combining the epitaxially grown The first opportunity to decrease the voltage length product functional ferroelectric BTO material with a plasmonic device arises from switching from LNB with a Pockels coefficient of design. We present 72 Gbit/s non-return-to-zero (NRZ) data only 30 pm/V [17] to other ferroelectric materials that exhibit modulation and 116 Gbit/s 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation a stronger Pockels effect. Barium titanate (BaTiO3 ,BTO)is (PAM-4) experiments. Experiments are performed with modu- among the most promising ferroelectric materials for EO ap- lators featuring an active section that is as short as 10 μm, a plications, because of its strong Pockels effect [18]. Its largest measured frequency response that exceeds 70 GHz (only lim- Pockels tensor element is reported to be r42 = 1300 pm/Vin ited by the experimental instruments) and a record low voltage- the unclamped, zero-stress case, and to be r42 = 700 pm/Vin length product between 150 and 200 Vμm, depending on the the clamped case [19]. The Pockels effect of BTO has already modulation frequency. Furthermore, temperature stability up to been exploited in active Si photonic devices [20]–[24] and [53], 250 °Cisshown. since BTO can be epitaxially grown on Si [20]. Recently, EO The paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the modulators based on BTO have even been monolithically inte- device design and concept. Section III depicts the fabrication grated on an advanced Si photonic platform, opening up possi- process of the device. Section IV discusses the influence of bilities towards monolithic integration with electric circuits in a BTO’s crystalline orientation on the device design. A deriva- foundry environment [24]. tion of the effective Pockels coefficients is given. Section V The second opportunity to decrease the voltage-length prod- presents passive as well as EO characterization experiments. uct and simultaneously raise the EO bandwidth dramatically is These results include the frequency response of PFMs and the to transit from photonics to plasmonics. A plasmonic modulator temperature stability test. Section VI shows the data modula- device can be built using a metal-insulator-metal slot waveguide tion experiments of 116 Gbit/s PAM-4 and 72 Gbit/s NRZ. geometry. Here, metal electrodes are used both as guiding struc- Section VII concludes the work by summarizing the key results.